Sunday, November 1, 2009

Halloween!!

So despite a month full of massive allergy attacks, Dan and I were still very excited about Halloween.

We carved pumpkins and went to a halloween party and dressed up. It was all very exciting. Dan and I went as a Death Panel. Our name tags say "Socialist Government Bureaucrats" and I had a clipboard with people's names and Dan had a scythe with which to render our judgments. I made a kitty pumpkin and Dan made a zombie with a sewn up mouth.

We also had candy for trick or treaters but we only had one family come by. Sadness.

It's been a busy month. They found a replacement for me at the Roper Center so I was able to stop working there. I miss the people I work with, but it's nice to have that time to get classwork and research done now. It was a good job, but I'm glad we're in the position where I don't need a second job. Many people are not so lucky.

Dan's class is going well, he's showing them The Dark Knight this week (and part of next week I think) and they're writing their papers on it (applying the theorists they learn about in class, of course). Advising is going well for me; students have started registering for classes, so I have quite a bit of actual work to do now, which is good.

Classes are going well at the moment, although they are quite busy. We're getting into the paper writing stage. Wish us luck!


Thursday, October 1, 2009

Recovery and illness

So I was recovering pretty well from having my wisdom teeth out, and then I caught the flu. Ironically, I started feeling symptoms the day I was supposed to get a flu shot, but couldn't because of medicine I was on for my teeth. Now I'm working on recovering from the flu. This mostly involves lots of water and sleeping for most of the day. The cats have gone between being total jerks and biting my feet and not letting me sleep and being adorable snuggle kitties. Typical cats. I'm going to go sleep some more now.

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Not even a proper post...

Sorry, it's been forever since I've updated and this isn't even a proper post. We've been very busy with school, work, and other activities. Dan and I have been playing soccer on an intramural team with people from our department. I've been singing in the church choir. Teaching is going well for Dan, advising is going well for me. I've also been totally busy doing interviews for the book chapter that Jamie, Sarah, and I have been working on.

I will update this properly soon, hopefully, but I wanted to give a heads up that I'm getting my wisdom teeth out on Friday morning. They've been giving me almost constant pain, so I really needed them out. I'm hoping that recovery will be quick. I'm going to be super busy this week trying to get ahead for next week because I expect to be out of it this weekend.

Thursday, August 27, 2009

Back from Ohio

Dan and I made it back from our whirlwind trip to Ohio. 1200ish miles, 2 families, 6 days. ::collapse:: We got to spend two days with each family but it was nice to get some quality family time in before the semester starts. We won't be back until December (boo). The kitties stayed home because they like the car even less than I do. They were very glad to have us home and showed their affection by climbing all over us as we tried to sleep and rubbing cat hair (and allergens) all over our faces. It's good to be loved.

I still haven't uploaded pictures from the camera yet, mostly because I'm not positive where the cord ended up. Probably in a box somewhere. Unpacking obviously got put on hold while we went to Ohio, and has been further delayed by my getting sick almost as soon as we got back to CT. We had to be at school early so that Jamie and I could work on recruiting for our study about graduate student parenting, so I made myself some Chai tea because no sleep=cranky Corinne. However, it also equaled a very sick Corinne about 25 minutes after getting to work. And I've been feeling awful all day which means it probably wasn't just the tea, I probably have some sort of bug. I'm sorry if I've infected anyone else.

Despite this setback, I am going to have everything unpacked by the time the semester starts!

Not much going on in the Tagliarina household right now. Dan finished his first class and is finalizing his syllabus for his fall class. My dad got me Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog for my birthday and the soundtrack, which Dan and I have been listening to almost constantly since I opened it. That's been a lot of fun. My mom got me a bunch of new clothes for school for my birthday, which are super cute and also professional. My favorite is a gray and purple argyle sweater that I am totally in love with.

Dan and I discovered PriceChopper (and by discovered I mean finally decided to check it out when we saw that grapes were a dollar cheaper a lb than Big Y this week). They are open 24 hours. They have a fuel rewards program. It's like Krogers! (except I do not know the quality of their store brand items yet). However, the store did have a funky smell, but our weekly shopping was about $30 less than normal (including coupons), so I almost don't care.

Well, I've officially become one of "those" people who blogs about saving at the grocery store, so I'm going to head to bed and hope I feel better in the morning.

Sunday, August 16, 2009

Birthday Present

So I got the last part of my birthday present from my husband last night. We had tickets to see Mike Birbiglia in Newport, RI. So we made the 2 hour drive over from Manchester to Newport and spent the afternoon walking around downtown. I thought that there were supposed to be mansions everywhere, but apparently not where we were, because we didn't see any. But we did have a really amazing dinner. I had lobster mac and cheese, which had penne pasta and asiago cheese and soooooooooooo much lobster. It was insanely good and totally worth breaking my diet for. I've decided it was okay because we walked for like three hours yesterday. And then we got to the show, which was in a tent.

...

So, yeah, this was at the Newport Yachting Center, and whenever I think "yacht" I naturally think rich people, swanky place. Instead, we find a tent. Which Mike Birbiglia made so much fun of, appropriately so. The show was so hilarious. It was a great mix of stuff that I've heard before, and stuff that was new (at least to me). This was the first stop on his new tour, so if you think you might be interested in him, check him out. He's been on NPR's This American Life several times. For anyone who already loves him, get tickets if you don't have them already, it's a great show!! And also, I'm the hulk, I'm the hulk, I'm the hulk. :) Dan and I got to meet him after the show, and we got a CD signed, which was awesome. I got all tongue tied and stupid, as usual. What I should have said was that we also have an unpronounceable Italian name (Tagliarina). What I actually said was some sort of babbling about how great he is (which is true), and how much I loved him on TAL and The Moth.

The surprise of the evening was MC Mr. Napkins, the opening act. He was funny enough to be the main act of a show (although not funnier than birbigs, because, let's face it, there are few things funnier in this world than Mike Birbiglia). However, he was significantly funnier than the comedian headlining at a major comedy club in Cleveland I saw at a bachelorette party who seemed drunk or high and mostly made jokes about Michael Jackson (I wonder if he's changed his act). Mr. Napkins is a jewish guy with super curly hair who raps (not too badly actually, and he was pretty good on the CD). His lyrics are hilarious though, full of lots of word play, which I love. Dan and I also got to meet Mr. Napkins after the show, and I was able to behave like a more reasonable human being and hold an actual conversation. But yeah, he's really hilarous, and we got his CD, so if you want to listen, let me know.

All in all, it was a pretty awesome birthday present!

Sunday, August 9, 2009

Still unpacking...

Oh my goodness how do we have so much stuff? We are still unpacking boxes full of papers and notebooks and crap from the last four or 5 years of our lives that we have just accumulated. And I'd just toss it all except I'll be going through a box and then go, oh, I wondered where my birth certificate/high school diploma/other important document was. Glad I found that.

We had been having problems with our Cox internet service, and so we were going to switch to AT&T. Long story short, after spending a lot of time trying to get all of that taken care of, it turns out that getting a sattelite won't work unless we're willing to leave two windows open all the time to run cords through (Um no), and we spent over a week waiting for our DSL to work and Dan had to stay home for three days. By this point, all of the problems with Cox had been worked out, so AT&T - you lose! DSL was less expensive, and Satellite was only slightly more expensive than what we pay now for limited basic cable and waaaaaaaaaay less expensive than extended basic, or digital cable, and we would have gotten 200 channels and a DVR, but I guess it was not to be. Le sigh.

We had some people over, our friends Rob and Shaz to watch Hot Fuzz, which was really really funny. The cats were actually sociable.

Speaking of the cats, they have been insane about wanting to play lately. Any time they see us they want to play and they look at a toy, then at us, then at the toy, as if to say "why isn't this in your hand being swung in front of my face for me to bat at?" It's pretty funny. Lenin has also developed a special meow for saying he wants to play.

Living in Manchester is great, we've gone on a lot of walks lately. Yesterday we didn't feel like working so we went on a 2 hour walk and then came back and Dan fixed my car. Last week, when we had no money, my check engine light came on and the car made funny noises as I was driving to work. I hadn't gotten to the freeway yet, so I turned around and took Dan's car. My car sat in the parking lot, waiting for us to get money in case it was something very bad. I had been noticing some problems accelerating at times, but we were hoping to get it through the summer before something actually went wrong because we already spent like $800 on car repairs for Dan's car this summer and had no savings left.

Then, this week, we got our security deposit back from our old apartment. We had money to get my car repaired!!! So we took it to autozone to get the code checked and got the readings. Cylinder 2 misfire. So then Dan called his Dad who can do almost anything on cars and he suggested some things to try. After a couple calls back and forth after doing various things, he figured it was probably a bad spark plug wire. So we went off to autozone to buy new wires. My role in all of this: I watched, I described the problems with driving that I had noticed, and Dan taught me how to remove, adjust, and put back my spark plugs. Yay for having a working car again (and for under $50).

Dan and I are going back to Ohio for a short visit at the end of August (2 days with each family), which will be nice.

Dan's class is going really well, he only has three students right now but they're really good. He's busy preparing for his fall class, which he's pretty excited about. I'm doing advising again in the fall, which will be nice, and I'm also going to try to take four classes instead of three, because I like to make things difficult for myself. We're both trying to get stuff done before the school year starts.

Monday, July 27, 2009

Moving

A quick update on our moving adventure. We are all moved into the new apartment and all moved out of the old apartment. We just finished cleaning this weekend. We still have a substantial amount of unpacking to do ::sigh::.

We're switching to AT&T for Internet and Direct TV for cable (well I guess it's actually satellite) because we are fed up with Cox Cable. I spent over 5 hours on the phone with them over three days attempting to get the internet to work. They were supposed to send someone out, Dan stayed home, the person did not come when they were supposed to, and then we find out that when they told me that a technician would be there at 3pm they really meant 3-5pm and that someone needed to be home in that whole window. The window that they neglected to mention to me, of course. Now we're in the process of getting approval from our rental company for the satellite dish, which is supposed to be simple, but they're can't find the form they need, so I've been sitting here for about 5 hours waiting for them to call me and tell me they found the form. I think it's probably not happening today.

Enough complaining, at least we are in our new apartment. It's wonderful! I love having a washer and dryer and a dishwasher. And we have storage space!!!! The cats are adjusting well, although Lenin is still kind of skiddish when we get home after being gone all day.

I have a Lenin kitty demanding attention and trying to lay on my keyboard so that's all for now. I'll post pictures once everything is unpacked.

Tuesday, July 7, 2009

July Already?

Whoa, how did it end up being July already? Summer is flying by quickly over at the Tagliarina household. I've been busy at work and getting back to work on the Parenting in Academia project that Sarah and Jamie and I have been working on. We just submitted our IRB paperwork, so hopefully we'll get it approved and be able to start the interviews before the summer ends.

We're also busy packing because we move to our new apartment in 10 days!!!!! We have friends (yay friends!!) lined up to help us move. Graduate students are very easy to bribe with food.

Dan's summer class starts next week and he's been very busy getting all of the administrative stuff taken care of for it and has started writing his lectures. He's very excited to teach his own class. He also found out that he will be teaching Introduction to Political Theory in the Fall semester. He found out several months later than everyone else teaching in the Fall because of budget stuff. So he's also been rushing around trying to do everything he needs to do for that class. It's lots of work but a great opportunity. Dan should have a really great teaching portfolio when he goes out on the job market. He's also been working on articles to send out to journals for review, but no word on any of that so far.

I have not gotten much of my own stuff done because working all day is kind of exhausting. Staring either at the computer or size 8 font for 7.5 hours wears out my eyes. I have gotten a lot of packing done, however, so hopefully when we actually hit moving day we will be in good shape. I've also done my last load of laundry in a pay machine (crossing fingers) because we're getting our own washer and dryer. I'm so excited!!!

The kitties have been all wide eyed and crazy about all of the packing and the change in their surroundings. Wait until they actually move! Lenin has been very talkative since we got back from Ohio, and they've both started chirping at the birds like my mom's cat does. We think he taught them. :) I hope the new apartment has a window that faces the trees so that they have birds to watch.

Friday, June 26, 2009

Pictures!

More updates from Ohio:


So here are some pictures from Noah and Heather's wedding. Dan and I look all pretty! Mom got me a new dress for the wedding and it's gorgeous.

While we were in Ohio, Dan and I also had our first anniversary! We had a lovely anniversary, we got a hotel room and went out to dinner at Benihana's and then to the Cheesecake Factory for dessert! Our very nice waiter at the Cheesecake Factory took our picture.


Dan's anniversary/birthday present from me was a PS3 (because I'm the best wife ever!).


Doesn't he look happy!

While we were in Ohio my mom had Carpal Tunnel Surgery on her left hand so she had time off work. So what did we do? We went to the Zoo! Apparently the Columbus Zoo has been rated number one in the country and we wanted to see what all the fuss was about. It was quite fun and much less crowded than the last time we were there. We got to see the baby elephant!





But now we're back home and back to normal. The kitties are very happy.



Friday, June 19, 2009

Introduction

Hello Internet! Or more likely: Hello friends and family! Dan and I decided to create a blog to keep you all updated about our adventures here in Connecticut. We're finding it difficult to go back to Ohio as much as we'd like to (or as much as our families would like us to) and we didn't do a very good job of keeping in touch with everyone. We thought that a blog might be a little big easier to let everyone know what is going on in our lives all at once.

We just got back from a trip to Ohio, I went back to work at the Roper Center, and Dan worked on writing his syllabus for his summer class. While we were in Ohio we got to see a bunch of people, including Heather and Noah at their wedding!!! I'm going to get some pictures off of my camera and I'll see if I can upload them to the blog.